Pairing-free certificateless blind signature scheme for smart grid

The smart grid is an emerging power system that can realize the information exchange between users and power companies in two-way communication and adjust power companies' power supply according to the real-time power requests from smart meters on the users' side. However, since malicious attackers can eavesdrop on two-way communication to collect and transmit information, they may leak users' information. Therefore, this paper proposes a new certificateless blind signature (CLBS) scheme with batch verification function and improves a power request system model for the smart grid to protect users' privacy. In addition, the proposed CLBS scheme simplifies the certificate management process in the traditional public key cryptosystem and eliminates the hidden key escrow in the identity-based public key cryptosystem. The unforgeability of the scheme is proved through the random oracle model, and the scheme's security can be reduced to the intractability of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). The analysis results show that our scheme does not use the time-consuming bilinear pairing operation, and has obvious advantages in computing performance compared with the existing signature schemes. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).